In his life, Richard Leakey has been both a politician and ecologist; the son of famous anthropologists Louis and Mary Leakey, he's also an evolutionary biologist who invented the term "the sixth extinction" to describe the coming environmental catastrophe. And now he's ruffling feathers by predicting a dark future for humanity. In a recent New York City press conference, he talked about the future. He began by suggesting that soon we'll have enough scientific evidence to prove that evolution is the one explanation for the history of life on the planet.

But then, he turned his thoughts to the far future:

If you look back, the thing that strikes you, if you've got any sensitivity, is that extinction is the most common phenomena. Extinction is always driven by environmental change. Environmental change is always driven by climate change. Man accelerated, if not created, planet change phenomena; I think we have to recognize that the future is by no means a very rosy one.

So there you have it: Evolutionary biology includes a dystopian future.